UFO nad Vranovem: the Mi-24 Pursuit over the Vranov Reservoir

Sunday, 12 July 1987. The Vranov Reservoir, beside Vranov nad Dyjí in South Moravia, lies a few kilometres from the Austrian border. That day it was full of people swimming and sunbathing. Nearby, a Mil Mi-24 attack helicopter of the 51st Helicopter Regiment was on patrol. Aboard were Captain Čestmír Tesařík, the pilot, navigator Ivan Pospíchal and a third crew member, Milan Šero.

Radar had picked up a target just inside Austria. The crew was vectored toward it. At first the pilots thought they were being sent toward a cloud. Ground control counted down the range. "20 kilometers, 15, 10, 8, 3, 2…"

When the ground called 200 metres, Pospíchal looked up and his eyes popped. A strange dark cigar-shaped object flew over him in the opposite direction. It had shown on radar, yet stayed invisible to the naked eye until those last 200 metres. "Proletělo to nad námi, toč," he called. It flew over us, turn! Tesařík described it as an aeroplane without wings. No cockpit. No visible propulsion.

Then came the order. Open fire and destroy the "aircraft". The crew held their fire. Beneath them lay the crowded reservoir. Whenever the helicopter got close enough for shooting, the target deftly changed direction. It always manoeuvred towards the sun. Tesařík could not get a weapons lock. After about two minutes, the object went into cloud.

Jaroslav Špaček would later call what came next "probably the worst situation of the entire flight." Flying on instruments through cloud, the crew heard ground control call the object coming head-on. "Directly opposite you… They just missed you to the left…" The flight engineer reportedly put on a parachute in record time.

At high, evidently supersonic speed, the object moved over Brno and Jaslovské Bohunice. After a while, radar lost it. Tesařík and Pospíchal later worked out its speeds from the ranges and times they remembered. Between 60 and 2,700 km/h.

After landing, the crew was ordered to destroy all records of radio correspondence and flight parameters. No radar data survives. No photographs, no physical traces. The Central Military Archive holds nothing on the incident. Vladimír Šiška of Projekt Záře observed that if three more aircraft had taken part, records and witnesses ought to exist, "yet no written documents can be found."

The story first appeared in 1998, in a regiment history by Jaroslav Špaček, the regiment's historian. Many retellings cast Špaček as the pilot. His own book names the crew as Tesařík, Pospíchal and Šero. Later accounts add two L-39 Albatros jets and a length of 10 to 15 metres, neither found in the available book extracts. Eduard Nový, a former Border Guard on duty at the Austrian border, says he watched from the ground. He first spoke publicly in 2018, as a guest of researcher Jaroslav Mareš.

The pilots rejected a Western jet. An F-104 or F-111 could not match the speed changes, the manoeuvres or a 2.5-hour flight without refuelling. A spy balloon theory circulates without a traceable source, but a balloon cannot explain 2,700 km/h. The only primary account appeared eleven years later, from a man who was not on board, and the speeds were reconstructed from memory. No official finding has ever been published.

In 2021, Tesařík and Pospíchal told it on camera in "Soviet Secrets", an episode of Top Secret UFO Projects: Declassified directed by Petr Vachler. TV Prima's Záhady covered the case, and the 2024 Czech comedy Franta mimozemšťan refers to it. In Czech it has its own name. UFO nad Vranovem.